Letter to the Community

GLOBE Breadcrumb

January 2017 Letter to the Community

Letter to the Community

Dear Friends,

We begin a new calendar year with new opportunities and challenges for GLOBE. We welcome Dr. Lin Chambers on board as the GLOBE Program Manager at NASA Headquarters.

Dr. Lin Chambers smiling for a photo.

Welcome Lin, I know we are excited about the opportunity of working with you to move GLOBE forward. New Working Group members are coming on board, as well, very soon....lots of new faces to engage with programmatic initiatives.

One of our bigger challenges is keeping up with the pace of technological change and meeting the demands of our community. I was at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center last week meeting with NASA and our SSAI colleagues to discuss priorities for the year ahead. Our systems have come a long way in a short few years, in no small part to the team working together and gaining insights and feedback from the Technology Working Group. Thanks to everyone for pitching in and being engaged with GLOBE.

We have some other wonderful events happening this year, outlined below, which give our community plenty of opportunities for engagement in the program. The 21st GLOBE Annual Meeting is getting closer and the registration page is now up. I hope you will join us in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, from 30 July- 3 August. The theme of this year's meeting is Coastal Resilience in Urban Environments and we'll be able to see that up close on field studies of the New Haven wetlands and along the shoreline of Long Island Sound. Our host is Connecticut partner Dr. Scott Graves, with assistance from his energetic colleagues at Southern Connecticut State University. Everyone in the GLOBE community is invited to attend what is sure to be an exciting international gathering on the East Coast this summer. And we'll be very near New York City, if you want to extend your time in the area after the five-day event.

The 2017 Regional Meetings are lining up. The North America Regional Meeting recently took place in Fayetteville, Arkansas and in just a few weeks the Africa Regional Meeting will be held in Cotonou, Benin.

This year's International Virtual Science Symposium is underway. Reports and presentations, due 3 April 2017, can be uploaded on the IVSS webpage. You can find all needed information there, too.

Planning is going on for a series of U.S. Regional Science Symposia, beginning with the Southeast Regional at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama on 27-29 April. Find information here. If you are outside the United States and will be involved in a science fair locally or regionally, or if you have knowledge of fairs coming up that are open to GLOBE students, please let us know so that we can share your news.

We'll soon be announcing more information about the Instructional Materials Task. GLOBE is working with BSCS, a science education curriculum development organization, to devise middle school activities that are aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The standards are used as a reference by many other countries when devising their own standards, so regardless of your country you may find this project relevant.

Dr. Tony Murphy standing for a photo.